Here are some notes for the map:1) Tranquillitatis, though deep and coral-rich, lacks inhabitants of its own; the mysterious, shadowed citadel of Maskelyne casts a gloom across the waters, which even the gnomes of the Taurus Mounts feel little drive to investigate. Certainly the witch-wary margasta tribes, who claim the trifold isthmus between Tranquillitatis, Foecunditatis and Nectaris, believe the dour city's island to be cursed. They believe the same -- and rightly -- of the far shores of Foecunditatis, where many in the montane villages of yaks and goatherds are as human as you or I.http://www.pandius.com/emerge.html

2) Although there are exceptions -- the margasta are every bit as fanatical about mummifying their deceased as Nithians are, and the bhuts of Vedal don't tolerate the competition -- most HM natives have given up on their ancestral burial-customs or cremation practices, in favour of leaving the dead "to lie in state" in some isolated locale, and turning a blind eye to pisachas' comings and goings.http://www.pandius.com/sor_efct.html

3) They're Hollow Moon rakasta. Rather small and timid, compared to most of the Mystaran breeds, which is why more aggressive species drove them extinct there; their closest cousins are the ocelot-breed from that old Dragon article on rakasta subraces, so I named them for margeys. Simple hunter-fisher tribesfolk, very good at hiding and slinking around, with a deep fear of curses and bad luck.Hey, it's a nocturnal game-setting! Cat-people certainly belong there.

4) Gutenberg's (lowest left corner caldera on the map) lava-flows follow the same path southward, year after year, building up a long ridge that reaches much of the way to Mare Nectaris while seldom endangering any lives. http://pandius.com/ndisastr.html

This is a little preview of what I'm working on for Threshold #15. There is very little to go on with regards to the margasta, and I was having a difficult time coming up with a culture to mimic them after. Finally it hit me and I decided not to use a RL culture, but to go with a literary one instead. My daughter has been reading these novels about Warrior cats, so I thought I would take some inspiration from there.

There are several clans of margasta in the southern tri-isthmus. Fireclan, Seaclan, Stormclan, Darkclan, etc. Boneclan is a special clan in tune with the afterlife. Margasta mummify their dead, and so Boneclan guards the entrance to the underworld - the Ancestor's Cavern where all of the leaders from the past are buried. Margasta from across the tri-isthmus travel there to lay to rest their great leaders... and sometimes to commune with them...

There are also three settlements in the north, simply labeled as Blood, Tooth, and Claw. The margasta here live very close to the Trade Cities, and have been adapting their ways for quite some time now. They are considered to be savages by their brethren to the south, and have ceased practicing the warrior code of the margasta clans.

If anyone is familiar with the Warriors novels and wants to help flesh out some of these clans, please feel free to do so!

It could be, but there are a couple of reasons I didn't want to go that way.

- We already have Olmec-like cultures (Oltecs), and I wanted to do something different- What little description we have from Sharon paints them as fairly primitive. Although I want them to have some things in common with South-American/Northern African cultures (namely the mummification), I didn't want them to be comparable technologically.- The cat culture painted by the Warriors books is just too good to pass up... and I wanted to inject a little something different into the work.

Having said that I'm not opposed to adding some more South American culture in as flavor for these guys, but I just don't want to redo the Oltecs or the Azcans.

Looking around we might be able to draw some additional inspiration from the older mummy finds in South America, like the Chinchorro mummies or the mummies found in the Atacama desert (created through natural mummification rather than ritual mummification).

Sure, still consider that we (europeans and north americans) have often a distort perception of the native amerindian cultures, as we tend to underestimate their diversity.Just in the amazonian basin you can find hundreds of cultures all very different from each others.I have actually studied Native Americans History (mostly Pennsylvania and Delaware) in college, but when I went in Peru on a holiday I get to know better how much diverse the native cultures were.The Inca of southern Peru living in the mountains and building pyramids of great stones were nothing like the natives of the region were now stand Lima, who lived in a dry environment and builded pyramids made of bricks. Not just the material culture, but also the people look very diffent. So the Oltecs and Azca of Mystara should be considered a broad definition covering many different cultures, and you can easily build unique ones by using the real ones. Take a look at the number of cultures here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenou ... es_in_Peru (the people that could be considered nearest to the Mystaran Classical Oltecs) and trust me that each two of them are as diverse and unique as the Spaniards and the Polish are in Europe.

That said obviously the inspiration of the warrior cats is a good idea and probably you do not need to go into much specifics at this stage.